Author(s): G. A. Cohen Source: Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 4 ...

1 The Currency of Egalitarian JusticeAuthor(s): G. A. CohenSource: Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 4, (Jul., 1989), pp. 906-944 Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: : 04/07/2008 15:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work.

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3 INTRODUCTION In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called "Equality of What?" Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society. What aspect(s) of a person's condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians, and not merely as cause of or evidence of or proxy for what they regard as fundamental? In this study I examine answers to that question, and discussions bearing on that question, in recent philosophical literature. I take for granted that there is something which justice requires people to have equal amounts of, not no matter what, but to whatever extent is allowed by values which compete with distributive equality; and I study what a number of authors who share that egalitarian view have said about the dimensions) or respect(s) in which people should be made more equal, when the price in other values of moving toward greater equality is not intolerable.

4 I also advance an answer of my own to Sen's question. My answer is the product of an immanent critique of Ronald Dworkin, one, that is, which rejects Dworkin's declared position because it is not congruent with its own underlying motivation. My response to Dworkin has been influenced by Richard Arneson's work in advocacy of "equality of op- portunity for welfare," but my answer to Sen's question is not that Ar- nesonian one, nor is my answer as well formulated as Arneson's is.' It needs much further refinement, but I nevertheless present it here, in a * I thankJerry Barnes and Tim Scanlon for their generously extended and very incisive criticism of a draft of this article.

5 And, for their many helpful comments, I also thank Richard Arneson, John Baker, Tim Besley, Ronald Dworkin, John Gardner, David Knott, Will Kymlicka, David Lloyd-Thomas, Grahame Lock, John McMurtry, Michael Otsuka, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, Amartya Sen, and Phillippe Van Parijs. 1. See Richard Arneson, "Equality and Equality of Opportunity for Welfare," Philosophical Studies, vol. 55 (1989). My criticisms of Dworkin were conceived without knowledge of Arneson's partly parallel ones, but it was reading Arneson which caused me to see what positive view my criticisms implied, even though that view is not the same as Arneson's.

6 Ethics 99 (July 1989): 906-944 ? 1989 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/89/9904-0005$ 906 Cohen Currency of Egalitarian Justice 907 rough and ready form, because of its association with relatively finished criticisms of others which I think are telling. If this study contributes to understanding, it does so more because of those criticisms than because of the positive doctrine it affirms. In Section II of the article I distinguish between egalitarian theses of different strengths, and I indicate that certain (not all) counter- examples to stronger sorts of theses fail to disturb correlative weaker ones.

7 Section III scrutinizes two Rawlsian criticisms of equality of welfare. The first says that an uncorrected welfare metric wrongly equates pleasures and preferences which differ in moral character. It puts the pleasure of domination, for example, on a par with pleasure from an innocent pastime, where the two are equal in intensity. And the second criticism says that the welfare metric caters unjustifiably to expensive tastes which are gen- erated by, for example, their bearer's lack of self-discipline. Those criti- cisms defeat equality of welfare, but, so I claim, they do not, as Rawls thinks, also induce support for a primary goods metric, and the second criticism is, moreover, hard to reconcile with Rawls's views on effort and desert.

8 Ronald Dworkin refines and extends both Rawlsian criticisms of equality of welfare, although primary goods are replaced by resources in the Dworkinian development of the Rawlsian view. In Section IV I show that much of Dworkin's critique of equality of welfare will be met if egalitarians allow deviations from equality of welfare which reflect people's choices: that is, Arneson's equal opportunityfor welfare theory. But some of Dworkin's objections to equality of welfare cannot be handled in Arneson's way, and the right response to them is to affirm what I call equal access to advantage, where "advantage" is understood to include, but to be wider than, welfare.

9 Under equal access to advantage, the fundamental distinction for an egalitarian is between choice and luck in the shaping of people's fates. I argue that Dworkin's different master distinction, between preferences and resources, is less true to the motivation of his own philosophy than the one I favor is. Thomas Scanlon argues, however, that the fact that a person chose to develop a certain taste is only superficially significant for distributive justice. The reason, he says, why egalitarians do not compensate people for chosen expensive tastes is that those tastes, being chosen, are ones which they might not have had.

10 According to Scanlon, it is not their chosen but their peripheral or idiosyncratic character which explains why expensive tastes have no claim to be satisfied. In Section V I defend my emphasis on choice against Scanlon's skepticism, but I also significantly amend the choice-centered egalitarian proposal to cater to what seems undeniable in Scanlon's case against it. Finally, in Section VI, I claim that Amartya Sen's writings on "ca- pability" introduce two answers to his "Equality of What?" question, each 908 Ethics July 1989 of which has its attractions but which differ substantially in content, as I shall show at length II.